The Navajo Nation stretches across 27,000 square miles of high desert in Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah, a region roughly the size of West Virginia where average rainfall hovers between six and ten inches a year. Roughly 165,000 people live there today, and nearly a third of their homes have no running water. Families haul water across open desert in plastic containers, cook over propane, and go dark when the sun sets. This is not a historical relic.
It is the present condition of a sovereign nation that has, for over 150 years, watched its land and resources be taken for the benefit of others while its own people went without. The roots of this crisis lie in the forced removal of the Navajo, or Diné, from their homeland in the 1860s. In 1863, Brigadier General James Carleton ordered Colonel Kit Carson to wage a scorched-earth campaign against the Navajo people. Carson burned their crops, slaughtered their livestock, destroyed their peach orchards in Canyon de Chelly, and poisoned their wells.
By the winter of 1864, thousands were starving. Between 1864 and 1866, roughly 8,000 to 9,000 Navajo men, women, and children were marched 300 miles southeast to a desolate patch of alkaline flats near Fort Sumner, New Mexico, a place called Bosque Redondo. Hundreds died on the march itself. Those who survived found a concentration camp with brackish water, failing crops, disease, and raids from enemy tribes.
Over four years, an estimated 2,000 Navajo died there. The experiment was a catastrophe, and by 1868 even its architects admitted failure. The government sent General William Tecumseh Sherman to negotiate an end. The Navajo leader Barboncito made one request above all others: let his people go home, to the land between the four sacred mountains.
Sherman agreed, largely because continuing to fund the camp was expensive and because the land the Navajo wanted was, from the government’s perspective, worthless. The Treaty of 1868 established a reservation of roughly 3. 5 million acres, land considered uninhabitable, too dry for farming, too remote for settlement. The Navajo walked 300 miles home.
But the land was given because nobody else wanted it. For decades, the Navajo built a life that worked on its own terms. They raised Churro sheep, brought to the Americas by the Spanish, and their wool became the basis of a thriving economy. Families herded their animals across vast distances, following seasonal patterns of grass and water.
They farmed small plots where springs made irrigation possible. Trading posts became the commercial infrastructure of the reservation, the entire economy compressed into stone buildings where weavers exchanged extraordinary rugs for flour, coffee, and tools. It was not abundance, but it was self-sufficiency, built around what the land actually was. The federal government destroyed that self-sufficiency in the 1930s.
A soil scientist concluded that Navajo livestock were overgrazing the land and that silt washing off the reservation was filling Lake Mead, the reservoir behind the newly built Hoover Dam. The dam was too important. Between 1933 and the mid-1940s, government agents forced Navajo families to surrender enormous portions of their herds. Many animals were driven off and shipped to market.
Many more were shot on the spot and left to rot, or doused in kerosene and burned in front of the families who had raised them. The exact number of animals destroyed is debated, but the effect is not. The livestock reduction shattered the Navajo pastoral economy. Families that had been self-sufficient for generations suddenly depended on government commodity foods: canned meat, white flour, lard, processed cheese.
Diabetes, virtually unknown among the Navajo before the 1930s, began its rise into the epidemic that now affects roughly one in four Navajo adults. The cruelest irony is what the livestock reduction was protecting. The Colorado River had been divided among seven western states in 1922 through the Colorado River Compact. The Navajo were not at that table.
No tribe was. The compact allocated water to states, not to the nations whose land the river ran through. The Navajo Nation received zero allocation. Their water rights were acknowledged to exist under a 1908 Supreme Court doctrine, but they were never quantified, never funded, never delivered.
The water went to Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Las Vegas. The people whose land sat inside the basin hauled water in barrels. In 1944, the Manhattan Project needed uranium, and geologists found substantial deposits running through Navajo land. Over the next four decades, nearly 4 million tons of uranium ore were extracted from mines on the Navajo Nation.
Navajo miners entered those mines with no protective equipment, no ventilation, and no information about the dangers of radiation. The mining companies knew the risks. The federal government knew the risks. The miners were not told.
By the 1960s and 1970s, they began dying of lung cancer, kidney disease, and stomach cancer. Widows who washed their husband’s contaminated clothes developed cancers of their own. Children who played in radioactive tailings piles showed elevated rates of bone cancer and leukemia. On July 16, 1979, the single largest release of radioactive material in United States history occurred at Church Rock, New Mexico, on the eastern edge of the Navajo Nation.
A dam holding back uranium mill tailings cracked and gave way, sending 93 million gallons of acidic radioactive water down the Puerco River through Navajo communities. No evacuation was ordered. No federal emergency response arrived for days. When the mines closed, the last in 1986, over 500 abandoned uranium mines remained on the Navajo Nation, many open pits, unfenced, near water sources communities still depend on.
Then came the coal. Peabody Energy opened two mines on Black Mesa, one of the largest coal deposits in North America. The Kayenta mine fed the Navajo Generating Station near Page, Arizona, a 2,250-megawatt plant that began operating in 1974, one of the biggest in the American West. The electricity went to cities across Arizona and Nevada.
The Black Mesa mine fed a different plant in Nevada, and to get the coal there, Peabody built a 273-mile slurry pipeline. The coal was crushed, mixed with water, and pumped as a liquid. The water came from the Navajo aquifer, one of the only significant sources of clean groundwater on the reservation. Billions of gallons of pristine drinking water were pulled from beneath a desert where people hauled water in plastic jugs, used to transport coal to a power plant in another state.
People drove an hour to fill containers from a spigot while beneath them, a corporation pumped their groundwater to move rocks to Nevada. The Navajo did not benefit from that plant’s output. They were its fuel supply. The aquifer levels dropped.
Springs that had flowed for as long as anyone could remember dried up. The Black Mesa mine closed in 2005 when the Mojave plant shut down, but the aquifer will take decades, possibly centuries, to recover. The Navajo Generating Station kept running until November 2019, 45 years of operation. At its peak, it employed about 500 workers, many of them Navajo.
The jobs were good and real. But for all those years, the plant generated power for cities hundreds of miles away while an estimated 15,000 or more Navajo homes had no electricity. The transmission lines ran right past communities living by kerosene lamp and propane heater. A Navajo family south of Page could look north on a clear night and see the glow of the plant’s lights against the sky, three smoke stacks over 700 feet tall, while inside their home there was no light switch, no refrigerator, no electric heater for winters that drop below zero.
The electricity generated from their coal, mined from their land, traveled along high-voltage lines that passed over their heads and landed in somebody else’s wall socket 300 miles away. The plant was demolished in 2020 and 2021, its smoke stacks collapsing in controlled explosions. The closure cost the Navajo Nation an estimated $30 million per year in revenue and eliminated hundreds of well-paying jobs. The desert got cleaner air.
The workers got unemployment. And across the reservation, the darkness remained. The reasons for that darkness are structural. Running a power line to a single home 30 miles down an unpaved road across land with unresolved ownership requires negotiating multiple layers of tribal, federal, and sometimes state bureaucracy.
The cost per connection can run into the tens of thousands of dollars. Utilities serving surrounding states have no incentive to extend lines to scattered homes on sovereign tribal land. The Navajo Tribal Utility Authority has been working for decades, and solar installations have begun filling some of the gap, but thousands of homes still rely on kerosene flames and car batteries wired to a single bulb. Layered on top of this is the Bennett Freeze, an administrative order issued in 1966 by the commissioner of Indian Affairs to resolve a land dispute between the Navajo and Hopi tribes.
The freeze prohibited all development on roughly 1. 5 million acres of the western Navajo Nation. No new homes could be built. No existing homes could be repaired.
No roads could be paved. No water lines or power lines could be laid. For the roughly 8,000 to 10,000 Navajo living on that land, a collapsing roof could not be legally fixed. Homes deteriorated for decades with no recourse.
The freeze lasted 43 years, not lifted until 2009. When it was lifted, the damage was generational, homes described as uninhabitable, the backlog of needed infrastructure running into the hundreds of millions of dollars. The lifting of the freeze did not come with a check. The roads themselves are a crisis.
The Navajo Nation maintains roughly 14,000 miles of roads, less than 20 percent paved. The rest are dirt that turns to impassable mud in rainstorms and washboards into bone-jarring ruts in dry weather. Emergency response times are measured in hours, not minutes. Every dimension of the infrastructure gap came into catastrophic focus during the COVID-19 pandemic.
In the spring of 2020, the Navajo Nation had one of the highest per capita infection rates in the United States. How do families wash their hands frequently when they have no running water? How do infected people isolate in homes where multiple generations share two or three rooms? The virus moved through multigenerational homes with stunning speed.
The nation lost elders at a rate community leaders described as a cultural emergency, each death erasing knowledge that existed nowhere else. The pandemic did not create the crisis. It revealed it. So did the question of food.
The entire reservation, all 27,000 square miles, has approximately 13 grocery stores for a population the size of a small city. Families in the vast stretches between towns rely on gas station convenience stores where fresh produce is rare and expensive. A family may have no grocery store within 50 miles, and the prices at whatever store they reach are higher than in Phoenix because the supply chain is longer and the market too small to attract competition. What fills the gap is what has filled it since the livestock reduction: processed food.
Even fry bread, the famous Navajo staple, was born at Bosque Redondo, invented from the white flour, lard, and sugar the government handed out when it took away the sheep. And yet the people stay. Many have lived in cities. But a remarkable number come back to a place with no running water, limited electricity, and contaminated land.
Part of the answer is economic; leaving is expensive, and the skills that make someone functional on the reservation do not always translate to a resume. But the deeper answer is the land itself. To the Diné, the land between the four sacred mountains is where the people emerged into this world. Navajo ceremonies are tied to specific places.
Certain prayers must be said within sight of certain mountains. The identity of the Diné as a people is inseparable from the geography. When Barboncito stood before Sherman in 1868 and asked to go home, he was asking for the continuation of a civilization. And when the government gave him the driest, most supposedly worthless stretch of the American West, it accidentally gave him exactly what he needed.
Because the land itself was what mattered. Every policy since then, livestock reduction, uranium mining, coal extraction, water diversion, the Bennett Freeze, chronic underfunding, has been a variation on the same miscalculation. The government looked at the land and saw nothing, then found value and extracted it, then could not understand why the people would not leave. They do not leave because leaving is not an equivalent exchange.
An apartment with running water in Phoenix is not a substitute for the place where the holy people walked. One is infrastructure. The other is meaning. And for 165,000 people, meaning wins.
Some things are changing. The 2021 federal infrastructure law has directed billions toward tribal water systems. The Navajo Gallup Water Supply project, over a decade in planning and construction, is designed to bring treated water from the San Juan River to communities across the eastern Navajo Nation, potentially serving 43 chapters at a cost of over $2 billion. Solar installations are multiplying, and for families who will never be connected to the grid, a single panel and battery can mean the difference between darkness and light, between no refrigeration and a small fridge that keeps insulin cold.
But the scale of the deficit remains enormous. Fully addressing water and sanitation needs on the Navajo Nation would cost several billion dollars. Road maintenance backlogs stretch into the hundreds of millions. The federal government has never funded its treaty obligations at anything close to the level required.
The gap between what was promised and what was delivered is not a gap. It is a canyon, the kind the Colorado River carved through this same desert given enough time and enough force. On a clear morning in Window Rock or Chinle, someone fills a yellow plastic container with water from a spigot or from a tank delivered by a water truck. The container goes into the back of a truck.
The truck drives down a dirt road to a home with no plumbing. Inside, someone puts coffee on to boil on a propane stove, the water poured carefully because it has to last. Outside, the mesa catches the first light, red rock turning gold, the shadow of the San Francisco peaks just visible on the horizon. The air smells like juniper and dust.
The coffee boils. The day begins. Same as yesterday. The land does not change.
The water does not come. The people do not leave. The yellow container sits by the door, half full.
It will need filling again soon.